Open Startup Report #12 - March 2024

By Ruth Cheesley · PUBLISHED April 03, 2024 · UPDATED April 03, 2024

Key points 

  • Our expenditure was higher this month due to travel and legal expenses, income is growing from memberships and sponsorships.
  • We’re still seeing a strong growth in adoption of Mautic, including a promising start to the free trials program at the end of the month.
  • There has been a surge in new members joining the community and a continued onboarding of new contributors.
  • Mautic 5.1 is imminent with a large number of new bug fixes, features and enhancements.

Finances

Income

This month we had four new individual members and a stable continuation of our monthly sponsors through Open Collective and GitHub.

While we have not received funds for any corporate memberships, we have an invoice out for a Gold Tier membership and also several Community Tier memberships in the final stages of completion. These should be represented in next month’s report.

Description

Amount

Sponsorship - Open Collective

$1,805

Sponsorship - GitHub Sponsors

$736

Membership - Individual

$400

Total

$2,941

Expenditure

This month saw the last of the travel expenses for the recent conferences and events, and also further legal expenses in respect of defending a Trademark claim and renewing one of our existing trademarks (required every five years). There was a small increase in infrastructure costs which was due to an invoice being paid late, just into March instead of in February.

Description

Amount

Employment

$8,922.40

Travel and expenditure

$1,582.82

Legal

$975

Infrastructure

$459.40

Host fees

$254.10

Payment processor fees

$97.13

Total

$12,290.85

Contributions

A big thank you to all the organisations who have contributed to Mautic in March!

These organisations are making Mautic and helping to grow our awesome community!

🔎 You can always take a look at the data for the last 90 days via this link: https://savannahcrm.com/public/overview/2b4590bf-cad0-4c71-870a-6f942a25f8fe and you can now view this month’s report here: https://savannahcrm.com/public/report/4d47fd2a-89f3-47b5-acc5-5dfafa3554c3/

⬆️ = Increase from last month

⬇️ = Decrease from last month

Organizations

Most active companies

Dropsolid 404 (⬇️ 6.48%)

Acquia 184 (⬇️ 41.21%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 109 (⬆️ 57.97%)

Webmecanik 99 (⬆️ 33.78%)

Bluespace 66

Friendly 63 (⬇️ 13.70%)

Codefive 57 (⬇️ 12.31%)

Leancept 56

Comarch 33

Blacksmith 24

Top contributing companies

Acquia 35 (⬇️ 80.87%)

Dropsolid 25 (⬇️ 77.48%)

Comarch 14 (⬆️ 7.69%)

Webmecanik 11 (⬇️ 56%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 6 (⬇️ 68.42%)

Devsadda 5 (⬇️ 84.38%)

Aivie 4

Bluespace 4 (⬆️ 300%)

octree-gva 2

Friendly 1 (⬇️ 50%)

Contributions are as defined here with the addition of Jira issues being closed as completed, GitHub Pull Request reviews and Knowledgebase articles being written or translated, which we track through Savannah’s API.

Want to appear on this list? Get contributing, and drop me a line with your company name, domain and the folk who work for you and we’ll make sure that you are attributed correctly! 

Individuals

Most active contributors

Anderson José Eccel 215

Jan Linhart 160

Mike Van Hemelrijck 109

Ekke Guembel 71

Norman Pracht 66

Oluwatobi Owolabi 66

Joey Keller 63

Ricardo Freire 57

Jakob Persson 56

Rembrand 42

Top contributors

Jan Linhart 28

Anderson José Eccel 14

Patryk Gruszka 11

Zdeno Kuzmany 8

Priyanshi Gaur 7

Tim Mallezie 5

Mike Van Hemelrijck 5

Rahul Shinde 5

Saurabh Gupta 4

Adrian Schimpf 4

Welcome to our new contributors this month đź’–

ar84

Esther Okafor

Joseph2001-braganza

Markus Heinilä

gauravaxl

Martin Stadelmann

Priyanshi Gaur

firyx

Vibhuti

Ismail MHIRI

bob99

Thomas Wijnands

nishant-s7

gbm_admin

Ketu Patel

tomfriedhof

Top supporters

Jan Linhart 3

bob99 1

Norman Pracht 1

Joey Keller 1

firyx 1

Esther Okafor 1

Ricardo Freire1

Ismail MHIRI 1

gbm_admin 1

ar841

Usage of Mautic

We continue to see relatively stable numbers when it comes to downloads via mautic.org/download, with just over 2,000 unique downloads and just over 4,300 in total.

Image
Screenshot of downloads over time from mautic.org - red like showing all which is quite stable and blue line showing unique which dropped but is now back to normal levels.
Chart showing all downloads of Mautic via mautic.org. Source: Mautic instance

We’re seeing a marked increase in downloads of the main packages Mautic uses via Composer, as demonstrated by the core-lib and recommended-project packages in the chart below which have more than doubled in monthly downloads between March and all previous months.

Image
Screenshot of composer installs - lots of lines but most are up substantially from December.
Chart showing all downloads of Mautic packages via Composer. Source: Packagist stats

 

We continue to see a strong quarter-on-quarter growth rate of sites with Mautic tracking deployed, with the data retrieved via builtwith.com. After a strong spike in growth in the middle of 2023 due to a large company deploying tracking on many domain holding pages, growth continues to be above 10% per quarter, compared with previously between 4-10% on average.

Image
Screenshot of quarterly growth between 2022 to 2024 showing a steep rise since 2023.
Chart showing quarter-on-quarter growth percentage by date Mautic tracking first detected. Source: builtwith.com

As well as sites adding tracking, we also need to keep an eye on sites that are removing Mautic tracking - suggesting that they’re no longer using Mautic. While this is not an exact science it does allow us to keep tabs on the general trend.

We know that there were a lot of folks removing Mautic tracking from 2020 - more than those who were adding it - however this trend has started to reverse since Q2 2023 where, aside from Q4 we’ve had more people adding tracking than removing it. We’ll continue to monitor this important metric going forward.

Image
Screenshot of net sites added/removed - since 2020 there's been more removed than added but this has changed since 2023.
Chart showing the net number of sites where Mautic tracking has been added or removed by quarter. Source: builtwith.com

Despite only launching the trials at the end of the month, we’re already seeing strong results. Between the 26th March and the time of writing we’ve had 135 signups in total and although there have been a few small bumps in the road, mostly everything is running smoothly.

We already have some conversions into paid accounts coming through, each of which results in a 40% revenue share coming back to the Mautic project every month.

Image
Screenshot of trial signups by date in graphical form. Shows a drop over the weekend and around 20-30 per day.
Chart showing number of trial signups by day. Source: Mautic instance

Community Health

We’re seeing a rebound in the number of visitors to our web properties, which was slightly impacted when we switched to Google Analytics 4 and by some sampling which had previously been applied on our calculations sheet..

Image
Screenshot of google analytics data showing a drop since 2023 but rebounding.
Chart showing traffic to *.mautic.org web resources over time. Source: Google Analytics

We’ve also seen a continued strong surge in new members joining our community over the past month - 110 people in total - with 17 new contributors which is awesome to see! We’ve also exceeded 7,900 members this month - not long until we hit 8,000! While the growth is starting to slow somewhat, it’s still a positive sign that the community is continuing to welcome new members.

Image
Screenshot of member growth - the line goes up and to the right.
Chart showing growth in members joining the Mautic community over time. Source: Savannah CRM

March saw a whopping 170 contributions which is fantastic, with over two-thirds being pull requests created (60) or reviewed (71) and the rest divided between forum support (24), blog posts (7), providing feedback (4), Jira issues (2), speaking (1) and hosting (1) events or meetings.

As a result of the surge in activity on GitHub, the upcoming release of Mautic 5.1 is going to have a LOT of new features, enhancements and bug-fixes.

A big thank you to everyone who has helped by contributing in some way this month, you’re helping make Mautic one contribution at a time!

Conclusion

It’s great to see that we’re continuing to grow a wide, diverse base of organizations and individuals who are supporting Mautic, both practically and financially. This will be vital for the longer term sustainability of the project. Although income was outweighed by expenditure this month, we have a strong pipeline of future memberships and with the launch of the new trials, a potential new revenue stream coming on line soon, giving us confidence in future financial growth.

In terms of adoption, Mautic continues to see steady growth in the number of people downloading, installing and using Mautic on their web properties and the trend is shifting into a more positive direction, with more users installing and adopting Mautic than removing their tracking. This growth, along with the expanding community of contributors and the anticipation of new enhancements for the upcoming Mautic 5.1 release, is a promising indication of Mautic's potential for future development and expansion. 

Credits

A big thank you to Peculiar C Umeh who has taken on the unenviable task of helping me to update the Open Startup Reporting spreadsheet each month!